Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Web 2.0 to Mobile

Just as Facebook is about to go IPO, there are already talks about how Facebook's over $100 billion valuation might not last too long.  Eric Jackson wrote an article yesterday on Forbes yesterday about how he sees Facebook and Google might not be around in next 5 years.

Eric makes an argument that large companies are slow to adapt to fast changing environment, and this will likely lead to big companies like Facebook and Google to miss the fundamental shift in the technology that's already happening.  That shift he talks about is moving from Web 2.0 to Mobile.

Guess there are more smartphones than iPhone and Samsung;
let's see whether we'll have room for Windows phone.

It is no surprise to anyone that mobile is literally changing how we live our lives.  Things that we would only read about from a science fiction are common occurrences.  We take pictures of things and instantly share them with friends.  Within a few minutes we can talk about what we posted online with friends from all over the world.  We don't talk about dial tone or presence anymore.  We just post, and people respond.  We look up product information instantly and compare prices while standing in a checkout line.

When I look around, all signs point to huge disruption.  With all computing powers and instant access to information, we are entering extremely volatile time in technology.  And all of them converge on single point, which is people are carrying mobile devices.

It is what allows Big Data companies to collect massive amount of location data, it is what we use to access information and connect with one another, and it is what we carry to augment our reality with virtual network.  It's all mobile.

And it's happening fast.

Reading through Eric's article and his comments, no one disputed the fact that mobile is creating a big change in the current technology landscape.  It will take about 4-5 years until number of mobile devices exceed the number of population.

We all know these changes are coming.  It's just that we don't know what they look like yet.  It's time to start making some bets.

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